Park Street: what to eat on Kolkata's most famous half-mile

Park Street has been Kolkata's dining address for seventy years, and the honest position is that some of it lives on that reputation and some of it deserves it.

Peter Cat is the institution, and the chelo kebab is the reason. It is one of the few dishes anywhere that has stayed identical long enough to become a fixed point in a city's memory. The queue is real, it moves faster than it looks, and the wait is part of the transaction.

PaPaYa Modern Asian Bistro is the other end of the street's range — a fusion room where the cooking has a point of view rather than a heritage. Ilish Truly Bong does the Bengali side properly, which matters on a street where the famous names are largely continental. The Gazeboo covers fine dining, and Barbeque Nation covers the eat-until-you-stop end of the market.

The practical advice about Park Street is about timing rather than choosing. It is a dinner street, it is busiest between eight and ten, and it is at its best in December when the whole stretch is lit and the crowd is half the point.

One thing worth saying to visitors: Park Street is not where Kolkata eats every day. It is where Kolkata goes out. The best Bengali cooking in the city is in smaller rooms in other neighbourhoods, and treating this street as the whole story would be like judging London by Piccadilly.